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USOpen.com sets live Internet records with Woods in playoff

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The United States Golf Association (USGA) announced that the recently held USOpen.com set a record for live concurrent streaming viewers during the playoff round of the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego, California.

More than 2.5 million streams were served on USOpen.com, surpassing all previous single sporting event numbers. The numbers peaked at more than 600,000 concurrent streams during the playoff.

USOpen.com’s new video internet console allowed fans to watch the playoff in a high quality and reliable environment. The technology was provided through its newest corporate partner IBM, which designed and hosted the site.

Originally posted on June 17, 2008 @ 9:42 am

Wazoo Sports receives $2 million for expansion

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High school broadcast network Wazoo Sports, Inc. has received a $2 million equity funding from Meritus Ventures, L.P.

Wazoo Sports, Inc. has offices in London, Kentucky, Knoxville, Tennessee and Benton, Kentucky. Wazoo Sports currently employs 15 people between the three offices.

During the 2007-2008 high school basketball season, Wazoo Sports broadcast 88 games live over the Internet. Wazoo Sports also provides unlimited on demand viewing of their content, including all 88 basketball games from this past season.

Originally posted on June 18, 2008 @ 11:34 am

TNT and NBA.com gets chatty for playoffs

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Basketball fans visiting TNT.tv andTNT’s broadband channel TNT OverTime on NBA.com during the 2008 NBA Playoffs will find a new interactive feature: KnockNok chat. TNT has partnered with Los Angeles-based KnockNok to host a new live, interactive chat technology on the Web sites. A new vision for chat technologies, KnockNok hosts dynamically topical micro-chat rooms for major sports and entertainment events, giving fans the chance to rile one another and share commentary in real-time.

Leveraging the popularity of blog commentary and discussion forums, KnockNok gives sports fans and web users real-time interactivity to make web coverage of live events truly engaging.

Will this service click? Maybe, but not with me. Without Chris Paul and LeBron James playing, I would rather watch baseball (I’m biased).

Originally posted on May 21, 2008 @ 12:28 pm

NYTimes.com to cover Olympics with blog

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The New York Times announced launch of a special online section for the 2008 Olympic Games with a new blog called Rings. Rings is dedicated to the full range of topics surrounding the summer Games in Beijing, from the competition itself to the social, political and economic issues attached to them. Rings brings together analysis and perspectives from sports, foreign and business reporters at The New York Times and in its bureaus around the world.

During the Olympics, The Times’s special online section will include:

• Contributions from more than 25 Times journalists in China, including “Sports of The Times” columnists George Vecsey and Harvey Araton

• An interactive guide to the Games where readers can view daily and hourly event schedules, up-to-the-minute results and corresponding Times coverage

• Forums for readers to post comments and share their stories

• Audio and video interviews and features

• Highlights from archived coverage of past Games dating back to the 1988 summer Olympics in Seoul.

Originally posted on May 18, 2008 @ 9:54 am

MLB partners with Swarmcast to bring all baseball games online

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Swarmcast’s Autobahn Platform will power all 2008 regular season games delivered live over the Internet on MLB.com’s MLB.TV in high-quality at 1.2 Mbps. With tens of millions of monthly unique users to MLB.com, 2,430 games and over 10,000 hours of live baseball being delivered over the 2008 season, this is the largest live streaming implementation of Internet TV in the world.

Built on Swarmcast’s patented multi-source streaming technology, the Autobahn Platform offers an unparalleled level of quality, reliability and scalability compared to existing solutions, where viewers experience rebuffering and other interruptions in service that undermine the overall user experience of online video. By blending multiple CDNs together, the Autobahn Platform bypasses limitations inherent to traditional streaming, ensuring that each viewer is watching video at the highest available bandwidth for their individual connection. On Opening Day, MLB.TV and Swarmcast delivered over 1.7 million live game streams, an unprecedented level of traffic that shattered previous opening day viewing records.

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Originally posted on April 29, 2008 @ 12:51 pm